We look into the secrets that make Ducati's 77.5-HORSEPOWER Slice-of-Superbike Single Cylinder Hypermotard so great. Mark & Kevin talk about the 659cc desmo single that powers the 2024 Ducati Hypermotard 698 and 698 RVE and have a special guest to tell us more about this spectacular machine from one of the most legendary makers of high-performance motorcycles.
Read more from Cycle World: https://www.cycleworld.com/
Buy Cycle World Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/cycleworld
Read a deep tech dive and interview with the Superquadro Mono engine designer: https://www.cycleworld.com/bikes/ducati-superquadro-mono-engine-origins/
Read more from Cycle World: https://www.cycleworld.com/
Buy Cycle World Merch: https://teespring.com/stores/cycleworld
Read a deep tech dive and interview with the Superquadro Mono engine designer: https://www.cycleworld.com/bikes/ducati-superquadro-mono-engine-origins/
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SportsTranscript
00:00 Welcome to the Sago World podcast. I'm Mark Hoyer, Editor-in-Chief. I'm with
00:04 Kevin Cameron, our Technical Editor. This week's show is on a Ducati. It's on the
00:09 Ducati Hypermotard 698 Mono and Mono RVE. The RVE gets some very cool graphics
00:17 and a quick shifter. Otherwise the bikes are the same. We had the opportunity
00:24 earlier, well actually late last year, to talk to the engineer in charge of the
00:29 project who was Stefano Fontoni. We set that up with Ducati North America. We got
00:34 a video call in the run-up to EICMA. They took the time in the run-up to EICMA,
00:39 which is the Insane Milan show. Insane for manufacturers who have to present
00:43 there, but they took the time to talk to us about the bike. So it's a Ducati
00:48 single, a giant Ducati single, making big power. And I'd like to go back in history
00:54 first. I know normally I throw to you Kevin and you take it away, but I'm gonna
00:58 go back in history because Ducati was a singles company making singles. And then
01:02 they made a V-twin using the singles that they had existing and putting them
01:07 into a 90 degree V. And lo, the Ducati Superbike was born and it did great,
01:11 right? We have lots of history in racing and the practically entire product
01:17 line was based on this V-twin and then it switched the belts, etc. And now,
01:22 well, and then in 1993 we had the Super Mono, which took a V-twin and then
01:27 removed the vertical cylinder and left the horizontal and left the connecting
01:32 rod and a weight inside to counterbalance that single cylinder that
01:37 was half of the 900. So that's a twin becoming back to a single, which it was a
01:44 single in the first place anyway. So hey, and then now we're back. We've taken a
01:48 1299 and they really did it this time. There is no vestigial cylinder, there's
01:53 no other balancer. Now I'm gonna throw it to Kevin Cameron and let's talk about
01:56 the 698 engine. Well, they had a wonderful cylinder head that would, I'm
02:07 sure it's very much, the story is very much like the one of the Vincent with
02:12 the two drawings of the Comet single. And someone laid one over the other and
02:18 said, "Oh, we could make a V-twin." And 1299 and the related products had had a
02:25 lot of cylinder head development. So here's a free cylinder head. What could
02:31 we, we could jack that thing up and put a single under it. I gotta pause you. That's
02:36 a great point. And the reason I pause you is, I think, and I've had a little bit of
02:41 empirical data to back this up, but I think when a manufacturer gets a
02:47 combustion chamber that works, that other bikes, like other engines follow. Like
02:54 they go, "You know, this worked over here. Let's put this combustion chamber into
02:57 this thing." Absolutely true. Yeah. Absolutely true. And especially where big
03:02 bore, where there's a big bore involved, which is what, 116. How big is it? It's really big.
03:09 116 millimeters big. Bigger than a big block Chevy. And to get that thing to run
03:17 on one spark plug is an accomplishment. But Ducati had been working on that kind
03:23 of thing for years and years. The reason that they didn't make their Grand Prix
03:28 bike a V-twin is because, Claudio Domenicalli told me, "We have no experience
03:37 with cylinders that big." But now they do, because they kept developing the 90
03:45 degree V-twin in World Superbike, even when it was parity with, displacement
03:54 parity with four cylinders. And finally, they went all the way to 1200 for the
04:01 Superbike and 1299 for the Street bike. And I think this is a particular skill
04:09 that Ducati have. I think they have a combustion department. And each, they've
04:14 made so many changes in engines, bore and stroke, that I believe they have a
04:21 method for achieving relatively rapid, relatively efficient combustion, even at
04:29 highly over-square bore and stroke ratios. This thing is up there. This is 1.8.
04:36 Yeah. There's a lot to unpack there. I guess what you just said reminds me in
04:44 talking to Stefano Fontoni at Ducati is what he said. You were talking about that.
04:50 You were talking about induction and turbulence. And he said, "Well, we have
04:58 some different ideas than other manufacturers about airflow." And I
05:02 thought, "Man, what a pregnant comment to make." We have other ideas, which just goes to
05:08 what you're saying, having a department dedicated to it. Now, you know, the bore
05:13 and stroke ratio is one thing that you might want to explain. I think maybe if
05:19 we start with what are the challenges of a big bore in terms of like flame speed
05:25 and all of that, like maybe we can illuminate that a little bit and try to
05:29 understand what the specific challenges are. If the field of fire is supposed to
05:33 be this big versus this big, how does that work? Absolutely. You will find if
05:38 you make a family of engines, a family of cylinders all having the same
05:42 displacement, but different bore and stroke ratio, that the ones with the
05:47 smallest bore will burn the most quickly. Not only because it's a shorter distance
05:53 from the spark plug to the cylinder wall, but also because since you're going to
05:59 have a high compression ratio, if the cylinder bore is relatively smaller, the
06:06 stroke is longer, and therefore the height of the combustion chamber in
06:10 which we want to store all this life-giving turbulence all the way to
06:16 top dead center, there's room for it. And the antithesis of this was the old-time
06:24 engines that had tall piston domes that remind, I think of them as
06:29 ecclesiastical pistons because they are like church steeples. And what they do is
06:35 they have so much surface area and the combustion volume is spread out in a
06:41 very thin lamina over this large area that the flame speed is greatly slowed
06:49 down because the little turbulent cells who are trying to pass the flame from
06:54 this one to this one to this one, there's so many of them that the combustion
06:59 becomes very slow. And the longer you hold hot combustion gas up against the
07:07 cylinder head, the more energy leaks away in the form of waste heat. It heats the
07:13 piston, it heats the combustion chamber, and it heats the radiator.
07:17 Well, and also what can happen? Well... We get rattle, we get knock. Yes, certainly.
07:26 Because when combustion slows down, it allows more time for the heat-driven
07:32 chemical reactions in the fuel-air mixture to get all the way to the point
07:40 where it has turned into a self-igniting violent explosive. Now, this is not
07:48 pre-ignition. Pre-ignition happens before the spark. Detonation, knock, tinkle, etc.
07:56 begins as a perfectly normal cycle. The spark ignites the mixture, the pressure
08:04 begins to rise in the cylinder, the flame front goes out, reaches nearly to the
08:10 cylinder wall, but meanwhile, the last part of the charge out there has been
08:14 heated and compressed and abused for a long time. And if those chemical
08:21 reactions go far enough, they're generating little active radicals...
08:28 Senator McCarthy, are you listening? Sorry. That it auto-ignites and then it
08:39 burns at or above the speed of sound. And when those sonic shock waves hit the
08:45 inside of the engine, we hear that knocking sound. Terrible sound, really.
08:50 Bad things, yes. And so, this is why rapid combustion, why you should have a
09:02 department of rapid combustion. And what Claudio Domenicoli told me about their
09:08 method, their general method, was that the two variables they worked with were the
09:15 intake duct diameter, which means the velocity of air entering the cylinder,
09:22 which is going to be the energy from which turbulence will come, and the
09:27 downdraft angle of the intake pipe. When it's steep, most of that energy is used
09:36 in filling the cylinder. When it is not so steep, more like Cosworth land, 30
09:43 degrees, it tends to create a tumble motion where the intake comes in through
09:50 the intake valves, flows across the head, hits the cylinder wall, goes down to the
09:56 piston, up the near cylinder wall to produce an energy, really a gas
10:05 flywheel. And it is the energy in that flywheel that will become turbulence
10:12 when the piston crowds all that material up to the cylinder head. It's like the
10:18 skater pulling her arms in in order to spin faster, because you're crowding that
10:25 the whole cylinder full of charge into the small clearance between the piston
10:31 and the head, that top dead center. So, that's why we want good turbulence and
10:40 short combustion, is to avoid knock. And unfortunately, the easiest way to avoid
10:47 knock is to reduce the compression ratio, which means it reduces the torque along
10:52 with it. So, this is a problem worth solving. Yeah, and efficiency and all the
10:56 things that would go with it. You know, when you say all of this, it reminds me
10:59 of having rebuilt my Valisette 500 single 1954, like, you know, 17 times in
11:07 my ownership. I got a good look at the combustion chamber in the piston, and it
11:11 is a domed piston. They did it to make room for valves, because the valves kind
11:14 of are angled this way. They're trying to get a larger valve, and that, you know,
11:18 that speaks to, I mean, that's an air-cooled motor, but it's like eight and
11:23 a half to one or something, or sometimes I have to put compression plates under
11:26 for modern fuel. And I always, you know, from the simplest perspective, I always
11:30 thought of the domed piston as, like, well, the flame has to go over the
11:34 mountain. This distance is far, much farther than this plateau, and what we
11:39 have in the Ducati engine is, yeah, it's a hundred and sixty millimeters, so it's
11:44 huge, well over four inches, is a big flat area, and it's gigantic. Yes, the valves that were at an
11:52 angle in the Valisette have come up, have, the valve angle has been reduced. And they
11:59 have, they have enough room to make it as big as they want it to be. Yes. They're
12:04 not, they're, I mean, they can, they have as much, I would, I would think they have
12:08 as much breathing as they could possibly want. And of course, the reason why you
12:17 make a very large bore is not because it's cool, it's because that's how you
12:23 get enough room to have the valves that can fill the cylinder in a very short
12:29 time that high RPM is going to allow for it. It's got to go, and have the intake
12:36 process finished. Not a, not a big, not a big long sigh, but a sudden sonic, nearly
12:45 sonic intake event. Yeah, so there's a couple things going on. One of them is,
12:50 I'm going to apply my extremely high mathematical skills and say, okay, this
12:56 engine's claimed horsepower with the stock exhaust is 77.5, and if this is
13:04 half of a 1299, that's, you know, less than, that's not that, that's not as much
13:15 power as a 1299. So if we double it, where'd, where'd that power go? What's going on?
13:19 Well, that power had to go because the 1299 is a great big motor. So even if it
13:27 has a somewhat limited bottom torque, there's so much displacement that you
13:35 can haul yourself, and you're not in considerable bulk of a girlfriend, or
13:40 whatever is on the back seat, away from an uphill stoplight, no trouble. But if
13:47 you try to do the same thing with a high revving little single, doesn't have the
13:52 muscular displacement. So for this and for other reasons, you, you pull back from
14:00 the cam timing that the 1299 is given, and they mentioned specifically, Stefano
14:09 mentioned specifically, that they shortened the valve overlap. So this is
14:15 what happened with Ducati's first V4, which was first spoken of in 1959 as a
14:23 police bike for Berliner. Apollo. Apollo, and then came into being in 1961. When
14:32 they first built it, it had 100 horsepower, and it tore up every tire they put on it.
14:36 So they dialed it back to 80 horsepower by reducing the compression from 10 to 1
14:42 to 8 to 1, and Harley-izing the cam timing. That is making it more punchy
14:48 down low, which means taking away top-end power. So that had only 80 horsepower.
14:55 Then they came back again, because that still tore up tires, and they reduced the
15:02 compression to 7 to 1, and they dialed the cam timing back even more, and they
15:07 ended up with 65 horsepower, and that worked, that the tires weren't eaten up.
15:12 So in order to make a single as tractable as you would like it, you're
15:19 going to have to come away from the valve timings of a big displacement
15:24 machine. Also, if, if we're talking about dirt, we don't want explosive power, we
15:32 want level power. And the way to get that is with shorter cam timings. And the way
15:42 that works is, if you open the intake valves at top dead center and close them
15:47 at bottom dead center, after a while you're going to say, "Wait a minute, we've
15:53 got that air moving into the cylinder, like 100 degrees after top dead center,
15:58 and then we're starting to close the valves. If we left the valves open longer,
16:02 air would keep rushing in, and power would keep rising. So you delay the valve
16:08 closing until you get to the point where it's unrideable, and you come back a bit.
16:14 It's like free horsepower in a way. But old-time Harley camshafts were close to
16:24 that, open stop dead center, close bottom dead center, because they needed grunt to
16:30 move a heavy motorcycle from a dead stop.
16:35 You know, I have to pause about the change, you change it so much and it
16:40 becomes unrideable. That has been a theme in all the development
16:45 people I've talked to over decades of talking to developed people, is they still
16:50 take it so far. The Andrea Forney, Ducati test rider, years ago we were on a
16:57 ride and I was talking about frame development, and I was getting some
17:00 movement in the chassis of this ST3 that we're testing, or ST4, and we
17:06 were getting some movement in the chassis, and we were talking about rake and trail
17:08 and all that, and I said, "Well, how do you, you know, how do you, you know, how do you
17:13 engineer a chassis, one of your trellis frames?" And he's like, "Oh, well, we build
17:16 the frame until it's strong enough, and then we just send the test rider out." And
17:20 he's like, "Yeah, that's good." And then we bring the frame back in, and we start
17:23 taking braces out. We just take material out of it until he complains, and then we
17:29 put the last one we took out and put it back in. So we make it, you know, we make
17:33 it unrideable, and then we dial it back, and there you go. But that's, you know,
17:36 that's the goal of engineering, right? Like, you can make an extremely strong
17:39 engine that weighs 50% more than it should, or could. And so we, our goal is
17:46 always as light as possible with all the durability, etc. So, anyway.
17:53 The worst example is a top fueler that has to be completely overhauled every
17:58 four seconds. One of the things that we should mention is vibration. Because when
18:05 Ducati was a singles company, from, say, '56 onward, they started out with 125s
18:14 and 250s. And that vibration isn't so bad because the piston is a little light
18:21 thing, and a motorcycle is much bigger than the piston, so it doesn't get set
18:26 into vibration as easily. But when they had the Desmo, they brought back Desmo in
18:35 '68, the 350 was quite a vibrator, and they built a 450. And the 450 vibrated so
18:42 much, it was the bike that would slowly move across a concrete floor on its
18:47 center stand while it was running. Oh yeah, and if you rev it, it moves faster.
18:51 It moves faster! No, they were notorious. Yeah, the 450s were notorious for being
18:57 pretty vibratory. So, at a point, they built a 500 twin. And it was quite heavy. I
19:05 think it was around 400 pounds. And they seemed to have, I think there was a push
19:12 on to make a bigger motorcycle, because they couldn't just keep making bigger
19:16 and bigger singles. Well, that didn't work either. So, I think Taglioni was aware
19:24 that the Apollo was a 90-degree V4. People have been aware since about 1900
19:32 that a 90-degree V-twin has inherent, or can be given, inherent primary balance,
19:39 meaning at the crankshaft speed, without any trick, counter shafts, or any other
19:48 nonsense. So, that's what makes that really attractive. So, along comes the
19:54 first, the bevel drive V-twin. And the thing revved, made its power at 9750 or
20:03 thereabouts. And here I am standing in front of the glass van at Imola in 1972,
20:11 talking with Paul Smart. And he says, "They're telling me this thing makes peak
20:18 power at 9700 rpm. Is that even possible?" And, of course, you have to realize that
20:26 Paul grew up in a world of Norton Manx singles. 7200 was hot stuff. Well, by
20:34 making the engine self-balancing, Ducati set the twin free from all these
20:40 vibration issues that cause modern people, when they ride one of those older
20:45 bikes, to say, "Are they all like that?" So, that was a great and liberating
20:53 decision. And they can now make a giant single like this because it has
21:00 counterbalancers. And that's a point that I wanted to make, is that, yes, there
21:07 are people who feel that counterbalances, "Oh, this thing suck wicked horsepower,
21:12 man. Gotta take them out." Take them out and break the frame.
21:17 Yeah, well, they tried taking the counterbalancers out of the Harley race
21:21 bikes. And, nope, you don't do that. Like, it's not designed to do that. It wasn't,
21:25 you know, you can't. Put them back in. And, frankly, I don't mind if there's
21:29 anything that's slowing the inertia down on the rear wheel a little bit with
21:32 whatever torque they have, right? Yeah. I mean, Ducati built, you know, you should
21:36 talk about the balance scheme there and, you know, various, maybe, various ways of
21:42 doing that. But they have two going in this one, do they not? Yeah, yeah. Because
21:47 if you make yourself a little chart with four positions, 0, 90, 180, 270, and you
21:58 map out where the counterweight is and the piston and so forth, if you balance
22:04 50% of the reciprocating, the back and forthing weight, then what you get is a
22:12 rotating imbalance of constant value rotating opposite to the crankshaft. And
22:19 this is a wonderful thing because you can balance that with eccentric weights on
22:27 shafts rotating at crankshaft speed. And you can end up with something that does
22:32 not break the frame, does not make the balls of your feet hot, does not put your
22:38 behind to sleep, does not make the grip feel like it's this big. Three inches in
22:43 diameter. It's like you're holding a tennis ball. I rode a Norton Cafe racer. I
22:48 think it must have had a, like a commando crank in it. And a commando crank has a
22:52 weight balance that works with ice elastics, with the rubber. And then if you
22:56 put that into a solid mount into the featherbed frame, which is the first time
23:00 I rode a featherbed frame, I was blown away. Except when you got past 3,400 on
23:06 this bike, my eyes would fizz. Like it would literally lose my vision. And the
23:12 grips did feel like this big. It just was like a light switch. It was insane. And
23:16 that, you know, we can control that now. We've known about counterbalances a long
23:21 time, but you know, they're in full bloom. They're used everywhere. We're tuning
23:27 them to give us the relationship, the feeling of the engine, or to give us
23:32 enough of that coming back from the bike. And riding a motorcycle now, like we can
23:37 make engineering choices. And we can satisfy that relationship, satisfy that
23:42 comfort. Or we can make a gold wing with a flat six, and we don't have to balance
23:45 anything. Or an inline six, which has perfect zeros all by itself. No vibration
23:51 there. We live in a great time. So, you know, I think we have a good technical
23:58 grip on what the power plant's been doing. We know it's half of a 1299. And a
24:04 few of the, you know, throwing the balancers in had to do that. Big valves,
24:09 big flat piston, right compression, a little bit less power. It's Desmo. I
24:15 think we get a lot from Desmo. Like certainly Ducati can control its valve
24:20 timings, perhaps more freely than other manufacturers can.
24:25 Here's the thing. Here's the thing about Desmo. And this is how Ducati may have
24:32 an advantage in off-road. Because around 2006 in MotoGP, the companies that were
24:43 still using metal valve springs were having to change them every night.
24:51 Because they were having to raise the stress level in the spring, work it
24:55 harder. And that caused the fatigue process to move faster. So before long,
25:02 there were the Ducatis, which had Desmo. And there were all the others who were,
25:09 and still are, using pneumatic springs. Just air in a little space. It's
25:16 compressed. There's not a lot of pressure there. There's not a lot of super
25:20 technology. It's just that nobody ever found a fatigue crack in air.
25:24 - It doesn't vibrate.
25:26 - That's right. It's wonderful stuff. Wonderful stuff.
25:30 - It doesn't start to sing. You know, like a spring can start to oscillate. All
25:34 kinds of bad things.
25:34 - Yes, that's right. Resonance.
25:35 - Air just says, "Who cares, man? Go ahead. Squeeze me."
25:38 - So Ducati worked hard on this whole thing. And I could hear the edge in
25:48 Domenicalli's voice when he said, "I would like better to see in your
25:54 articles a recognition that Desmo is more than just something left over from
26:03 the 1950s. We've stayed with Desmo, and we have developed it to be the equal of
26:10 any other system. And we use it because that's what we have the most experience
26:17 with." So Ducati have now won the world championship in MotoGP two years. And
26:26 evidently, their Desmo system is the equivalent in performance of pneumatic
26:31 springs, which were invented by people at Renault for Formula 1. And what this
26:40 means is, and nobody has gone back to steel springs. Steel springs may have
26:47 improved since 2006, but nobody's going back to them. So here is off-road
26:56 motorcycling, which is all steel springs. Ducati arrives with Desmo, which seems
27:03 to have a two-pound weight penalty. Oh, dear.
27:06 Lots to talk about that. I mean, we should preface this with, like, we're
27:11 talking about the big street single, which has Desmo, but we're also talking
27:15 about the Desmo 450 motorcross bike, the prototypes that they're racing. And so,
27:21 yeah, so you're getting, you're maybe getting more freedom in valve control
27:26 because Desmo is a cam to open and a cam to close. And there is, there is like
27:30 usually a helper spring that just ensures that nothing bounces around.
27:34 There's a very little spring, but it's not doing the work, right? It's just at
27:39 low RPM, it's helping the valve close more positively for a better idle or
27:44 whatever. And so essentially, you're not dealing with springs and you're able to
27:48 maybe accelerate the valve open hard and close it in a way that you couldn't do
27:54 with a closing ramp and spring. Normally with a valve spring engine, you design
27:59 the acceleration so that the acceleration during the cam controlled phase, which is
28:05 the initial lifting the valve up to speed and then decelerating it onto the seat so
28:13 that it doesn't go kabang and bounce all over the place. That is three times the
28:19 acceleration provided by the spring, which once the valve is up to speed, the
28:24 spring has to stop it without letting it hop off of the nose of the cam.
28:29 >> Dreaded float.
28:30 >> Falling, yes, falling onto the closing flank with a great clank and shock that
28:37 damages parts. So what we have here is Ducati has potentially the ability to go
28:50 farther in the direction that produces a flat torque curve from here to there.
28:55 Then it's possible to go with steel springs farther than it is possible to go with
29:03 steel springs. And that's-
29:05 >> So I mean, yeah, of all the advantages, you know, in particularly on the dirt
29:09 where you're dealing with, you know, dirt's got a certain level of traction. It
29:15 always has, you know, maybe it changes from day to day or with moisture, but
29:18 you're really, just like in dirt track, you're relying on the, we don't have
29:23 electronics for this. We have them, but we don't use them. So what you're relying
29:27 on is the rider's ability to apply the throttle and to keep the motorcycle
29:33 driving forward without a break in traction, which then particularly in racing
29:38 terms, takes a very long time to recover. If you lose drive and you get all that
29:45 spin. So you're giving the rider an element of control and a big swell of
29:50 torque that allows them to do what they need to do to win.
29:53 >> Yes. It makes the engine more linear so that what you twist is what you get.
30:00 Whereas during the honored years of the sport bike, it was nothing, nothing,
30:09 nothing, a little bit. And a lot of people love that.
30:17 >> I just remember, I remember riding some like FZ something Yamaha 750 built
30:24 up with flat slides and you know, hot motor, a lot of cam and all that and going
30:30 as I'm rolling the throttle on and it's like coughing and it finally clears its
30:35 throat, it's like everything you didn't want to have happen.
30:39 >> Yes. That's what you want to be. Anthony Goldberg at his best.
30:45 >> Absolutely. Or at his worst. I don't know.
30:50 >> Point of view. Point of view.
30:53 >> Yeah. So I guess, you know, it's probably a good time to transition to what
31:00 the bike was like to ride. I didn't ride it, but our editor Bradley Adams flew to
31:06 Europe to ride the Hypermotard 698 Mono and Mono RVE. They went to a cart track.
31:13 I don't know about you guys out there in video and podcast land, but every time I
31:19 look at a Hypermotard or Motard bike in general, my collarbones tingle in a good
31:23 way. But anyway, welcome to the show, Bradley. You have the honor of being our
31:28 first guest, but you bring back the truth and experience of riding the Mono. Let us
31:35 know what's up, dude.
31:36 >> Yeah. Excited to get to talk to you guys about the bike, which in itself is an
31:43 exciting motorcycle. I mean, and I will say, yes, it was a car track, so no street
31:48 ride, which was a little bit unfortunate. But yeah, I mean, that's the environment
31:52 where you really get to see what that thing is capable of. And the cool thing about
31:55 that car track is talking with Xavi Fores, who is actually there with, he's a Ducati
32:01 rider, rode a Moto America Super Sport last year. And he said it's a popular
32:07 training ground for a lot of GP and super bike riders.
32:11 >> Oh, that specific track.
32:12 >> Yeah. Yeah. So he doesn't live very far from there. And he came over and rode the
32:18 bike alongside with Josh Heron. And yeah, apparently that's the place.
32:22 >> Oh, that must have been mental.
32:23 >> Yeah. So we're trying to figure the bike out and myself trying to figure out how
32:27 to ride a super moto properly because I have very limited experience on a super moto.
32:31 Obviously a big road racing background, but not in sliding the thing necessarily.
32:35 And so I'm trying to learn the thing and then watching those guys who Josh Heron for
32:41 many years at his house in Georgia had a car track in his backyard. So the guy can
32:45 ride anything, but the guy can ride a super moto bike especially well. And watching
32:51 them rip around on those hyper motards was incredible. I mean, you're-
32:56 >> Well, Heron's pretty unglued anyway, right? He's very much the put it sideways,
33:02 do a stand up wheelie. He's extremely talented and also has a streak of showiness, right?
33:09 >> Yeah. He's just very confident in his skill set, right? So a lot of the media for
33:14 sure, you get out to a press launch and you're just like, "Hey, let's just learn the
33:17 bike. Our job is to take a story home with us." Where Josh's role is to create the
33:24 absolute coolest content he can, which includes sliding the bike everywhere, big stand up
33:28 wheelies, like standing on the seat and doing wheelies. And yeah, and just ripping around
33:33 and showing what the thing is capable of, which is what he did. Yeah, him and Javi both.
33:38 It was incredible to watch. >> Well, you mentioned the two techniques
33:41 is basically, if somebody's grown up road racing, it's not that they can't pick up the
33:45 Supermoto style, but you have basically, generally speaking, in a foot on the peg style, riding
33:50 like road race, sticking your knee out. And you can pitch the thing, you can do a brake
33:55 slide hacker that way, you can go into the corner sideways and all that, but you also
33:59 have the Supermoto style, which is very much, it is different. You are having your leg off
34:04 the bike and it's generally a little bit more sideways than your feet on the pegs type of
34:10 style. >> Yeah, and I mean, Ducati says that they
34:13 worked with the ergonomics, the rider triangle to make it so that it was a bike that you
34:17 could either go knee out like a road race bike or Supermoto style. The day that we rode,
34:23 the group that we were with, I'm not sure if it was mostly because it was people with
34:26 a road racing or street background. The majority of people were riding it, knee down road race
34:32 style, including Josh Heron. I did see a couple of guys go leg out Supermoto style. I have
34:38 taken a Supermoto class years back and did a day there. And they say that, hey, do whatever
34:44 feels comfortable to you. They basically end up being about the same speed wise. I'm not
34:47 sure how true that is, but yeah, the bike itself developed for both. I was comfortable
34:53 going knee out, but yeah, I think you could ride it either way, which goes to what Ducati
35:01 was trying to build this bike for, build it like a proper Supermoto bike, right? I've
35:05 ridden the hyper motards, the bigger hyper motards before. And for sure those ones felt
35:09 like just a bigger, more street focused motorcycle, but not something that we would have done
35:15 nearly what we did with this 690. Yeah. I mean, all the hyper motard, the Ducati hyper
35:21 motards I've ridden, when you first get on them, they do feel tall. They feel rock hard
35:27 within the street bike realm. And you feel a little bit odd when you get on them. But
35:34 after a couple hours, you're doing insane things you never thought you would be doing
35:38 on something that was a quote street bike, but it's not like a regular Supermoto motard
35:44 bike where it's just, it's lighter. It's more agile. Like I'm curious from your perspective,
35:48 you know, riding the bike front end feel like maybe take us through cornering on that bike.
35:55 Like what are you getting? You know, Supermoto hard bike is essentially like a motocross.
36:00 I mean, that's where they came from the French in the, you know, 90s, whatever, taking motocross
36:06 bikes and putting 17s on them and lowering them a little bit and then road racing them
36:11 on car tracks. And then it was sort of this weird phenomenon. Then you try one and you're like,
36:16 Oh my God, I think I just had like a season's worth of learning in two days of riding because
36:22 they're so mental, they're so direct. And I think I'm curious how, yeah, that's, that's the question.
36:29 Take us through a corner. What's your feeling, how super motard is it? And then talk to us about
36:33 corner exiting gearing and that kind of stuff. Yeah. So yeah, hectic is a good way of describing
36:39 it. I mean, especially riding a bike with, with that amount of power on a tight car track. I mean,
36:43 things happen quick and I think that's part of the excitement of riding a Supermoto, but, and that's,
36:48 that's definitely true of this one, especially, uh, the track itself. It was, I think actually
36:54 Ducati did a really good job picking that track because it had a little bit of everything.
36:58 It had two, at least two sections where you had really long flowing, fast corners where the things
37:05 banked over for a significant amount of time. Uh, and then it also had a couple really tight,
37:10 uh, switchback stuff. Uh, once you came coming onto the front straight, uh, so going back again,
37:16 what, what Ducati said in their presentation and what they've told us is that there was like an
37:20 extreme focus on weight bias and front end feel. So they really focused on getting weight over the
37:27 front compared to, they say the competition, I think it's 48.5% up over the front 51.5 at the
37:34 rear. Um, and then obviously you have a shorter wheelbase too, uh, which I think helps with the
37:40 agility, but going, going into front end field, the biggest thing I noticed was in the longer
37:47 sections when you had the thing banked over and I'm a heavier guy, I'm a bigger guy, six, three,
37:52 200 ish pounds, a little more with gear. So I, I have the tendency to kind of sack the rear out a
37:56 little bit, um, which did happen, but once we added some preload to the rear, we were able to
38:02 get a little bit more weight up over the front. And I thought front end feel was great in no time.
38:07 When I was riding that bike in, in the faster stuff, did I feel like I wasn't sure what the
38:12 front end was doing and then getting into the really tight stuff, hard on the brakes, diving
38:18 down into a corner, the front end feel there was phenomenal. Like I was really impressed. That's,
38:24 I grew up racing at Willow Springs where you're not doing a bunch of hard breaking or anything
38:27 like that, any tight corner. So I'm not a very heavy breaker and I don't really ride the front
38:32 very hard. Uh, but I was shocked at how late I could get in and just keep stabbing the brake
38:38 and load that front and then still get the thing to steer into the corner. Just really easy. Uh,
38:43 so that, those were some of the things that stood out, at least on the front end.
38:47 That's a good feeling. I mean, that's, that's all you could ask for. Yeah. You're on slicks,
38:52 right? You were, you were on slick should add, should add that. Yeah. So, so there is a decent
38:58 amount of grip, let's say for sure. Um, the other thing I was, I was going back and looking at GoPro
39:04 footage as we were putting our video together, which hopefully folks will get to check out on
39:08 YouTube soon. Uh, that, that really tight chicane. It's a, it's a right, left, right going onto the
39:14 front straight there at the track and how quick that thing would steer through the chicane was,
39:20 was really impressive. And I mean, for sure I could feel that while I was riding, but then it
39:24 even stood out in video, which sometimes it's hard for that stuff to stand out in video. Um,
39:29 well, that's a, it's a very important point because traditionally like Ducati's, you know,
39:35 if you watch the Ducati and world super bike, maybe more, more years ago than more recently,
39:39 but like I was at Ms, uh, Monza, uh, years ago when, uh, Troy Bayless, you know, started out
39:46 with Ducati that it was a 2000 he was brought up from Vansenheim. So I was at Mons and I was
39:52 covering basically moms that are right of feature, but I was watching them go through the chicanes
39:55 and you could watch the Kawasaki, a Curie on a Gala immediately go left to right, like
40:00 instantaneous and all those chicanes, all the Ducati guys would go wook and they would wait
40:06 at the top of the role and the bike would go, Hey, and then they would put it over and you're not
40:12 experiencing that. You know, that's, that's at this point in time, that is a vintage Ducati.
40:18 This is a modern Ducati and you're seeing rapid roll rate, no problems,
40:23 rapid roll rate. And I think that was really important there, especially on a cart track
40:28 because everything's happening so quickly. And the distance between the corners is so short
40:32 that you almost don't have the time to, to muscle the thing. It's just, it's boom,
40:37 you're through the section. So, uh, I think that was big, the agility there. I mean, obviously it's
40:42 got a, almost an, it's a full inch shorter, uh, wheelbase than, you know, than the Husqvarna,
40:48 Kast gas and KTM. Uh, and I think that's, and they had those bikes, like just pointing out,
40:53 they put those motorcycles in the presentation. Like these are the bikes that we are targeting.
40:59 Yeah, for sure. And that's, that's something you don't see a lot. I don't think we see a lot in our
41:03 industry is those direct comparisons. Um, but yeah, in the, in the one tech document that they
41:08 gave us, I think it was the first paragraph they, they called out those models. I mean, there's
41:13 no ifs, ands, or buts about it. I mean, that's the bike, that's the platform that they're going
41:18 up against with it. Yeah. And they're really the, the, you know, you can get a DRZ 400 SM,
41:23 which is a really fun bike, but it's, it's not, you know, it's, it, it doesn't start from the
41:28 space of we're making a very large single that shreds, you know, we're making a legit motard,
41:34 which is what the, you know, the gas gas and the KTM and the Husky are targeted as, you know,
41:39 they mean they're really, you know, I mean, KTM just says it ready to race. Right.
41:44 Right. Yeah. And you, you go through a lot of the figures, you know, as, as part of the event,
41:48 you know, prepping for it and going through all the, the important numbers, you know, looking at,
41:54 you know, those Austrian bikes and looking at their tech specs and then looking at the Ducati,
41:58 they are very similar. You know, I think the, the rake the, on the Ducati is it's a little bit
42:03 steeper. And again, you have that, that difference in the wheelbase, but trail is essentially the
42:08 same. Uh, definitely suspension travel is the same. So weight is weights a little bit interesting
42:15 because, you know, they say, uh, wet, no fuel. I think it is. Yeah. And then, so there's a little
42:24 bit of a discrepancy between how, how, uh, Husky Varna and KTM and gas gas, how they do their,
42:30 their weight claims. Well, this is just, I'm going to take a little pause. Welcome to cycle
42:34 world where we, we have certified scales and we measure the weight of the test bikes that we get.
42:39 So we're going to get these bikes and we don't have to speculate, but for right now they're,
42:43 I mean, for right now they are within pounds of each other. I mean, they are very, very close,
42:47 but you caught a claim to peak power. 77 and a half is slightly higher than what the claimed power
42:54 on the motard, you know, seven hundreds that are made by the Austrian company. So that's actually
43:00 an important point too, because, uh, the engine actually surprised me a little bit in that, uh,
43:06 I expected it to be this really peaky high revving engine and all the performance up there.
43:12 And, and one of the first couple of laps, when I rolled through, like I said, that tight chicane
43:16 going onto the front straight, it had a lot more bottom and in mid range than I expected it to
43:22 having looked at the numbers and compared torque figures, especially to, to the KTM and those bikes.
43:27 Uh, and I was surprised at how well it pulled off the corners. And it's funny actually, because
43:32 in the presentation earlier in the day, you know, they, they talked us through the engine and they
43:38 were talking about how, Hey, remember this thing revs to 10,250 RPM. Don't don't short shift it.
43:44 Make sure you're revving the thing all the way up. Um, and then, so I was expecting this very
43:51 peaky engine, but it turned out like I was actually into the rev limiter before I even noticed it,
43:56 like it rev, it pulled right through the mid range at that grunt. And then all of a sudden I was into
44:00 the rev limiter and I was actually bumping up to the, into the rev limiter a couple of times,
44:04 uh, before I realized that I had to shift a little bit earlier. So that was a interesting
44:09 dynamic from that engine that I didn't totally expect. Well, you're getting smoothness from the
44:14 balancers and then it's making a lot of power. I mean, 77 and a half is no joke. And you roll,
44:19 you know, you roll on and, and away you go. Suddenly you're there. Yeah. I think one of the,
44:24 one of the, what's really important here is the shape of the torque curve. It has no shape.
44:30 Look, look, look at that, uh, two 50 triumph that that's just a flat line.
44:39 Most of the two 50 triumph motocross bike. Yes. And they've done everything they can
44:46 to increase their control over valve acceleration. It has double overhead cam, no unicam
44:53 punches bolt. It has titanium valves and it has finger followers. Now it may very well be that
45:02 the step beyond that Desmo offers will take things further. But I think what's important here is this,
45:10 this lovely usable, uh, shapeless torque. It's just a line. And I think that gives the rider
45:17 confidence that no matter what I'm doing here, or maybe if I screw up,
45:22 there's acceleration available. I'm not going to have to tap it down. I can just go.
45:28 Yeah. How did you feel about like rolling on off the apex?
45:32 That was no issues there. I will say, and I think I even, I even wrote this in my story
45:39 because I'm not totally ashamed, but I actually stalled the bike a couple of times, leaving a stop,
45:44 which they, um, they do admit that they have a taller first gear on the thing. So you're not
45:49 running out of gear in first gear, uh, quickly. So they admit that and not a ton of fly, you know,
45:56 not a ton of flywheel inertia, the mass, the rotating mass, the kind of, but we, you know,
46:01 we, we want quick revving and I'm here to vote for a tall first on a bike like that. Cause I want to
46:05 gear, I want a gear that's usable and I'll cope with that on the street and, and try my best.
46:10 Yeah. I think, I think on the street and when we get the bike and do a little bit more street
46:13 testing, you know, I think it's just one of those things I'll have to be cognizant of. And, you know,
46:17 as I'm slipped the clutch a little bit more and give a little bit more gases, you know,
46:21 leave it stoplights and stuff. But yeah, I actually, I did stall it twice. So there was
46:24 that, that was a little bit embarrassing in front of you. Did you ever feel like you were in the
46:28 wrong gear? Like what Kevin was talking about? Like, Oh, I can't recover. I got to click back
46:32 down and, and get into a different, you know, lower gear to get my drive back.
46:36 I think, I think what I could say there is that there was a couple of sections where I actually
46:41 had options. I could, I could hold the gear. And because you have that taller rev limit,
46:46 I could hold the gear and I would just start bumping into the rev limiter before I was rolling
46:50 off. Um, but I had, the engine was flexible enough and the power curve is wide enough that I, I
46:56 actually had the option a couple of times, depending on how early I was on the gas,
47:01 I could just run it in that same gear or, or I could do the upshift. And then obviously have to
47:06 go back down a downshift before the next corner, but there was some flexibility there. It wasn't
47:10 that super narrow power band that, that, that really made it so that you had to make sure you
47:16 were in the right gear every time, a little bit of a side story, but just after that event, I went
47:22 and rode, uh, some KTMs, including the three 90 Duke. And I was riding that having just got off
47:29 that, the Ducati and that thing was so much work to, to keep in its happy, happy place.
47:36 They're like, I was constantly shifting that. And then I was like,
47:39 It was a three 90. I'm sure it's tuned a little bit more on edge to get everything they can out
47:44 of it. But the window, the operating window on that thing was so narrow where it was just like
47:48 really fast paced, a street ride in this really tight canyons. And I was shifting all the time.
47:52 And I was thinking back to the Ducati. I was like, it really opened my eyes to how much,
47:55 how flexible that engine was. Well, I'm very curious on the Ducati, uh, you know, the, the,
48:01 the way back machine here, uh, Italian bikes were notorious for having a peak power about three RPM
48:10 before the rev. And there was like no, no over rev at all. So I'm real curious to see what we
48:16 have from here's the power building and we hit peak power. And then how much over rev do we have
48:20 before we hit the rev limiter? I'll be curious. We got to get it on the dyno to get the truth
48:25 there, but yeah. Yeah. Based on, I mean, I generally pride myself in getting a good feel
48:30 for that stuff. Unfortunately, like I said, I was bumping into the rev limit. It feels like it does
48:34 start to taper off a little bit up, up top and, and, and kind of gets a little bit muted and then
48:38 you're right into the, to the limiter. So back in the old, and that was back in the two-stroke days,
48:45 uh, over rev was at a premium because basically the two-stroke engine is an organ pipe. It just
48:51 plays one note and they used to, they used to, uh, retard the ignition past peak power,
49:02 and put a lot of heat into the pipe and make it act, uh, longer, uh, make it act shorter. Pardon
49:13 me. And, uh, that would give you a bunch of over rev. And I saw it, I saw this done on a dyno.
49:20 Said here it is without the retard. And here it is with the retard. Such a difference.
49:25 Speaking of exhaust, we should mention here that the Ducati offers the Termignoni exhaust
49:36 for the hyper Motard sounds brilliant. I think Mark, you mentioned, you saw a clip
49:42 of us riding with the thing and you're like, you just commented on the sound, but also, uh,
49:47 what is it like they claim seven horsepower, three 0.3 pounds lighter. Nice. So that's,
49:55 that's pretty big. I think that the way to go, if, if you were looking at that bike is honestly,
50:00 I struggle a little bit with the price difference between the standard model and the RVE when
50:04 realistically the RVE is, is graphics and a quick shifter. You know, that base model starts to look
50:10 really good, you know, throw a quick shifter on separate if you want to, uh, especially if you're
50:15 doing, you know, going to a car track or something. In all fairness, it's, I mean, yes, you're right,
50:19 but it's also going to be the fanciest quick shifter because it's going to be mapped as
50:24 everybody's doing now. So it works at like moderate throttle and it works at wide open
50:28 throttle and you're getting a lot, but yeah, it's, it's like $1,500 or something. Yeah,
50:33 no, that's fair. It was, it is a brilliant system. Again, mentioning one of the sections that I was
50:39 talking about earlier, uh, where I was, I had the opportunity to kind of change gears or I was,
50:44 I was able to have the bike fully leaned over and shift and didn't upset the chassis or anything
50:49 like that. So yeah, it's, it's definitely worth having, um, I think the base model and then maybe
50:54 throw that on, I don't know, or you go the RVE because it does look a lot better with the graphics
50:58 on it. I know it's just graphics and, and some colored wheels, but it does look, it doesn't look
51:03 a lot more exciting than the standard. Yeah. Well, one of the things that I want to point out
51:08 about electronics, a lot of people, when they talk about electronics, they act like, oh,
51:12 it's so expensive. Oh, it's complicated. Oh, you can't fix it. Um, when a certain system first
51:20 appears, it's a special, but two years later, it's on the same chip with, with everything else.
51:29 And it's added two cents to the cost of the chip. So, uh, I think that, that we don't have to
51:36 be too frightened of electronics because it's, it has the potential to be made available to
51:43 everyone. How many people have a cell phone? I mean, a very substantial percentage of the
51:50 world's population now has a smartphone. And that is the same phenomenon that I'm talking about.
51:57 Yeah. It's, there's, there's no shortage of electronics on, on this bike. Right. I think
52:03 that's a big thing. A big push for Ducati is, is, you know, bringing a lot of that technology
52:07 that they've developed elsewhere in their lineup and bringing it onto this bike, which is.
52:12 Just like the cylinder head. They already had the cylinder head. Let's use it again and again.
52:17 Good point. Yep. Yeah. An interesting one, uh, is that slide by brake function as well.
52:24 Which we got to talk to the engineers a little bit about, uh, which luckily, cause it was more
52:29 towards the end of the day. And I finally asked like, Hey, how does, how does that actually work?
52:33 Uh, and so there's, there's four levels, um, uh, in, in level two, you still have ABS on the rear,
52:40 but what they're doing is they're letting the bike step out a certain degree. And, and what
52:45 they told us is basically all that's doing, it's working off the ABS system. It's just
52:50 relieving some pressure. Obviously you're gathering data from the IMU, understanding
52:54 the bike attitude and then, and then adjusting brake pressure from there. Yeah. So that's,
53:02 that is a unique system to see. You've got all this computing power that you've paid for in the ECU.
53:07 It should be working on your income tax while you're riding. So let it, let it do what it can
53:14 do. Yeah. I mean, it's, that stuff's amazing though. I mean, slide by brake and I've used, uh,
53:20 the Enduro, the lean sensitive Enduro brakes on KTMs and all that. And, you know, we've said this
53:25 on the show before, you know, electronics are exceptionally good now and you used to feel them
53:32 working. And a lot of, most of the time you don't actually feel them working. You just feel like,
53:38 dang, I'm good. You know, the hardest thing there is, is, is telling your, your mind to,
53:46 to trust them completely. Right. Especially like with the slide by brake where, because every input
53:51 that you put into the bike is going into the computer and it's, it's changing what, you know,
53:56 what the system want to do. So for instance, you grab the clutch lever or you twist the throttle
54:01 a little bit more and you're like, Oh, I'm going to go to the brake. And you're like, Oh, I'm going
54:05 to go to the clutch lever, or you twist the throttle a little bit more. You roll off the
54:09 throttle or you let off the brake. It's, those are all inputs going into the bike. And now it's
54:12 trying to recalculate what's going on. So especially, uh, again, trying to ride this like
54:17 a supermoto bike and slide the rear end of the corner with this slide by brake, where it's like,
54:21 you've got to just, you got to get a little weight over the front, the front brake, and then slam on
54:26 the rear brake and, uh, and then just trust the system that it's, you know, it's not going to
54:32 slide past where it's programmed to and, and not put any other inputs into it, right. By releasing
54:37 the brake or chopping the throttle. This is my personal, this is my personal struggle with
54:42 wheelie control is like, just can't do it. And then I'm trying to control it in my right wrist
54:49 and the computer's like, dude, what? Did you want something? Yeah, it's just, yeah. But yeah, you,
54:58 we are at the point where it's, it's okay. It's okay to put faith in electronics on bikes. Rider
55:03 aids are amazing. So if you could like nutshell this, the riding experience for us and we'll,
55:09 we'll close it down here. We'll, we'll exit, but a couple of sentences, like basically,
55:14 what are we looking at in, in the, in the, uh, the mono RV and standard? What are you?
55:20 Uh, exciting, busy, fun. Uh, all those, all those three things come together in one. And I think
55:27 that's, that's how you describe most, most supermoto bikes. So I, and I, I know that's
55:31 very generic, but I think the thing is, is that this is Ducati's let's say, first attempt at
55:37 building a really aggressive street legal supermoto. Okay. Yeah. The hypermoto has been a
55:41 hyper Motard has been around, but this is going a bit different direction with the platform.
55:46 So it's really their first try with that and with this new engine. And I think they're,
55:50 they're right on par with the competition, right there. They're, they've built a bike that
55:55 really honors the category. And it is, is what you expect if you were to walk into a dealership
56:00 and, and, and, and buy a supermoto bike. Right. So you've written, you've written V4s, V twins,
56:07 all the super bikes, scramblers, that whole thing. Uh, you know, like, does it feel like a Ducati?
56:13 Yeah. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it, to me it's, it's higher quality and, and obviously more
56:18 performance and more fun than, than any of the scramblers. Um, to me, it's got a little bit more
56:25 edge than a monster. I always think of monsters kind of in this weird place where it wants the
56:29 Ducati performance, but it's, it's, it's a little bit less on edge than what you'd expect from a
56:34 Ducati. And, and this street, I mean, that's an entire show is monster, the evolution of monster,
56:41 because monster was a stripped super bike with the air cooled motor in it. And it, and now we
56:47 have scramblers, which are sort of taking that mantle and then monsters are like, Oh, we're
56:52 performance. We have liquid cooling. And there, I mean, the recent monsters are the SPs and stuff
56:57 that we've had are been phenomenally fun to ride, but there is sort of the, what's the spiritual
57:03 target of the monster when you have street fighters. Well, you have a street fighter V4.
57:07 It's like, if I want mental naked bike, I'm going street fighter V4. Right. So there's a little bit
57:14 of a, you know, I mean, good problems to have. Great show. Thanks for coming in Bradley. I love
57:20 your hat, by the way. Superb. I don't know where you got it, but sign me up. Yeah. Great, great.
57:27 Great to hear about the bike. Thanks again, Kevin. If you like what we're doing, like down there,
57:34 hit that bell thing and we'll ring your bell thing in your YouTube. I hope you're listening
57:40 on Spotify or Apple podcasts while you're driving or something. Not to don't pay too much attention
57:46 to us and comment, comment down there and let us know what you want to hear about. And we'll
57:51 address that on a future show. We hope. Thanks everybody.